Networks of unmanned vehicles are often used in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The unmanned vehicles may be air vehicles, space vehicles, ground vehicles or water vehicles, or combinations of these types. The networks may also be used in combination with manned vehicles. The unmanned vehicles are often fitted with a sensor such as a camera to allow remote surveillance of an area or a target object. Networks or swarms of unmanned vehicles may be used to provide surveillance over an extended area. The unmanned vehicles may act co-operatively to provide complete surveillance over that extended area or to provide surveillance of a number of targets of interest in that area.
For any particular mission, the mission is decomposed into a series of tasks that are assigned to the unmanned vehicles. This is typically performed by an operator located at a ground control station. The operator may then assume ongoing supervision of the unmanned vehicles while the mission is performed.
Existing networks of unmanned vehicles tend to be designed with a centralized decision-making configuration like that described above, and with minimal distributed supervision. Hence, mission planning including task allocation, coordination and supervision, ranging from simple task requests to complex requests requiring sequences of high level tasks, are driven by a central decision making facility that is usually a ground control station. Such centralized configurations pose disadvantages and creates barriers to an efficient, autonomous, cooperative mission. For example, such a centralized configuration requires powerful computational means, is not scalable, suffers from data integrity and availability issues, and results in inflexible mission management.
There is a need for decentralized configurations where decision making responsibilities are assumed by the unmanned vehicles such that decision making is effected in a distributed manner.